Upon his return from that first trip, he had paid his uncle the $25 and his father $50. With the $1,275 left over, he purchased a small 12-acre spread of fertile opium-producing land. He had agreed to pay the owner a further $500 within four months. Over the next two months he worked night and day in the fields, personally scoring the opium buds and collecting the resin.
He enlisted the aid of some of his relatives, paying them more than the going rate for a day’s labor in the fields, but mostly he performed the work by himself. Izzy pitched in for free, incredibly pleased to be helping Yousseff. At the conclusion of the harvest, they had 50 kilos of cooked opium, which Yousseff turned into 40 kilos of heroin. This time he took a team of ten horses, and a number of his cousins and friends, and made the trip back to Peshawar. After expenses, he netted $4,000, $500 of which he used to pay off his debt on the property, and $3,000 of which was used for purchase of another 50 acres of farmland. His only expenses were in the purchase of the chemicals required for reducing the opium to heroin, and for further cooking, purifying, and screening equipment.
By the time Yousseff reached his fourteenth birthday, he owned more than 400 acres of land. Ba’al, following Yousseff’s lead and at his friend’s suggestion, had purchased an additional ten-acre spread near his parents’ home. This land was also used for opium production. At this point, one trip to Peshawar netted more than $15,000 American. Before long Yousseff was starting to experience a problem that would dog him for the rest of his life — what to do with all the money.
The soft neighing of his horse pulled Yousseff out of his reverie. He was near the place where his uncle’s farm had once been. Years ago, the Taliban, bent on some holy mission or other, had burned it to the ground. Yousseff had purchased it and converted it into poppy fields. The entire valley was his, and he had for years been employing means of modern farming and mass production to increase the crop volume and decrease costs. Instead of using old oil drums and rice bags, he had built a state-of-the-art underground laboratory, with spotless floors and proper ventilation. He had horticulturists, engineers, and chemists on his payroll. No one important had noticed the change. During the Soviet war, no one had cared about what was going on in this little corner of Afghanistan. The Taliban was easily bought off. The Americans seemed to have too much else on their minds. His business had flourished for many years, uninterrupted.
Indy couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d never seen account activity like this. In the end it hadn’t taken much time or effort to gather the information. He’d gone back to the Heather Street complex and put his affidavit and application materials together. The Dodge dealership faxed him a copy of the bill of sale and bank draft for Benny’s truck. He had one of the staff lawyers review the materials, and had the affidavit sworn. He was so eager to get to the courthouse that he took a marked police cruiser and flipped on the lights and sirens. He quickly found his way into a judge’s chamber and gained the order he wanted. He bribed the secretaries with coffee and donuts, to have the order typed and signed. By 11am he had the account records from Scotia Bank, dating back two years. At 11:15, still standing in front of the bank, he woke Catherine Gray at her home. She had just finished a busy night shift. Indy would normally have been apologetic, but right now he was thinking of other things.
“Oh man, Indy,” came the sleepy reply from Cranbrook, BC. “This had better be good.” She knew it would be — even half asleep, Catherine could recognize the excitement in his voice.
“It is, Cath. I’ve never seen an account history like this. We have deposit after deposit after deposit.”
“Big deal. If you were to pull my account, you’d see withdrawal after withdrawal after withdrawal,” she sighed, trying to smile past a yawn.
“Not this way. We’ve got cash deposits, all through automatic cash machines, throughout the province, and in Alberta. Sometimes as many as 30 or 40 a day.”
“Oh yeah?” Catherine responded. “For how much?”
“It varies, but it seems to be around $1,000 a pop. Sometimes as much as $2,000. Sometimes as little as $500. It’s averaging out to about $20,000 or $30,000 a day, if you add up all the separate deposits.”
“A day?”
“Yes. A day. Every day. Maybe $150 to $200 grand a week. Every week. Every month. From all over. Calgary. Edmonton. Vancouver. Kelowna. Kamloops. I’ve got one document showing more than 30 deposits at various Vancouver ATM’s in one day,” said Indy, excitedly. “In fact, if they’re doing this with five or six different banks, pretty soon you’re looking at real money.”
Suddenly Catherine’s brain woke up. “You know, I’ve heard of people doing this,” she replied. “We’ve got these automatic tellers everywhere now. In grocery stores, drug stores, 7/11’s, even Starbucks coffee shops have them. You put your cash in a little envelope and press a few buttons and you’re done.”
“Yup. It’s called ’smurfing.’ The easiest and oldest way to launder money. Little bit here, little bit there, no one’s ever the wiser. Even a clan of morons could legitimately put a lot of cash into the financial system this way. Just give each one of them $10 grand a day, and if you have 15 of them, you could quite easily put away half a million in a week. All expenses are paid for in cash. All it takes is 20 or 30 people, and none of them need to be overloaded with brains. It pretty much describes the Hallett/Lestage group.” Indy was almost jumping up and down in his excitement.
“Smurfing?” asked Catherine, thinking of little blue creatures in furry hats. “Did you say smurfing?”
“Smurfing. The Lestages and Halletts might be big-time smurfs. And with these numbers, in just this one account, we might be looking at a major operation. This could be indicative of a major league drug conspiracy. These characters may be able to lead us to the hole in the border. They may be involved in getting drugs into the States.” Indy was practically babbling now, jumping from one thought to the next without bothering to connect them.
“Oh, and here’s something else,” he added, reviewing the stack of printouts more closely. “Every couple of months we have close to half a million dollars withdrawn, electronically, and going to some other bank or institution.”
“Which banks?”
“Not sure. There are number and letter codes beside the transactions, but I don’t know what they mean.”
“I think they’re probably bank identifier codes. We ran into that in a commercial crime case that we dealt with couple of years ago. The banking people will be able to tell you.”
“OK Cath,” replied Indy. “I’ll call you back. Get some ideas down on paper about the manpower required to send people around western Canada for these deposits. And what it might mean for someone to be using that kind of manpower.” With that, he hung up, whirled around, and headed back into the bank.
9
Yarim-Dhar was even more desolate than Zighan. It was located in the northern part of the vast Darfur wilderness, where the waves of desert sand met thousands of square miles of grassland. Sharp-edged sandstone pinnacles in shades of ochre and vermilion, some rising more than 1,000 feet above the plain, punctuated the limitless sand. Here the Sahel, desolate and remote, was separated from southern and eastern Sudan by the ancient basalt of the 10,000-foot Jebel Marra massif. This was an area ruled by tribes of nomadic Bedouin warlords with ever-changing loyalties. Each sought ultimate dominion over the surreal landscape, cut off from the rest of the world. Some of these ruthless groups were at the heart of the ethnic cleansing of non-Arabic peoples in northwest Darfur. The terrain, the climate, and the desolation were all similar to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the lawless Northern Frontier areas of Pakistan itself.